Hello from the Pacific Ocean! Our day started out pretty normal but finished with a big bang today! During my first shift of the day, we recovered a second OBS from a depth of over two thousand meters. Everything ran very smoothly. At the beginning of our next shift, 4PM-8PM, Jason testing was underway. A line broke and the hood of the TMR fell into the ocean; this is where the craziness began. Its location is currently unknown, but plans to recover the hood via the Jason are currently being fine-tuned. Until then, this hood will be falling almost two thousand meters to the bottom of the ocean, waiting to be picked up by the crew of the Thompson.
Besides this unexpecte...

Good morning! It's 0314 on board as we are excitedly sitting in the lab after successfully retrieving out first ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) at 0245 this morning. The engineers are currently taking the device apart in the wet-lab and will be analyzing the data soon! But first, let's talk about what got us here to this exciting moment.
This spring, under the guidance of Maya Tolstoy, we five undergrads began preparing for our cruise on the Thomas G. Thompson. Although many of us already had a basic understanding of the geological processes at work, we started with a general overview of ocean bottom seismology and eventually progressed to more cruise specific det...

Five Columbia University undergraduates go to sea aboard the R/V Thompson as part of a class 'Sea-going Experience in Earth Sciences'. Read below to follow along with their adventures!The students are participating in leg 2 of the 2012 field season for the Cascadia Experiment, a large community seismic and geodetic experiment studying questions ranging from megathrust earthquakes to volcanic arc structure to the formation, deformation and hydration of the Juan De Fuca and Gorda plates. The goal of the leg 2 research cruise is to recover 24 ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) deployed in 2011, and deploy an additional 6. 20 of the OBSs are a new design called a Trawl Re...